The picture above is of a rugby scrum. Why? There is always a fight between shows for the audience for new shows. How many people see more than one new show in a season, which I defined as May in one year to September in the next to allow for those who buy tickets to a new show after the Tony’s. Every new show fights for as large as share as possible of the audience that sees new shows. Ideally the audience that sees new shows would expand but it seems however much it expands it is never enough to keep all producers happy. ​Last season, 2014-15, between May 2014 and September 2015, omitting suspected brokers, there were close to 700,000 purchases on Telecharge and Broadway.com (not including TKTS, box office, group sales) for the 25 new shows sold by Telecharge.com (our data does not include shows sold by Ticketmaster such as Nederlander, the New Amsterdam and the Lyric); Wolf Hall counts as two shows. Over 400,000 people made those 700,000 purchases. Sounds good so far.

Of those more than 400,000 people, 75% saw just one show (167,000 were local). This represented 46% of the total purchases (on Telecharge and Broadway.com for new shows in the 2014-15 season).

Some of these customers could have also seen Finding Neverland, An American in Paris, The Last Ship, etc., or bought tickets to another Telecharge show at the box office or at TKTS, or attended as part of a group.

The other 25% of the people made close to 400,000 purchases for 54% of the sales overall. They purchased an average of 3.5 shows. 64,000 of these customers were local

40% of the multi-buyers (43,000) were from out of town. Surprising isn’t it!

These customers also could have purchased another show at the box office, TKTS or through Ticketmaster for a Nederlander show.

28% of purchases were new to the Telecharge file (28.5% of local, 28% overall). That is 180,000 people. There is a good chance many if not most of the 180,000 new to file people are included in the group that saw one show. 85,000 of those new to file people were local.

Every show chases the audience who sees more than one show. Surprising that so many are from out of town. In total there were 230,000 locals on the Telecharge file that saw a new show: 167,000 saw one and 64,000 saw more than one. We need a larger audience for new shows. The rugby ball representing the new show audience is not big enough to support all the shows fighting in the rugby scrum that is the Broadway season.